1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to methods and systems supporting online consumer interactions by a user in a networked system.
2. Related Art
Conventional network-based marketplaces (e.g. consumer websites) provide users with functionality to browse a collection of items (e.g. goods or services) at a website and to make purchases using a variety of means. Centralized e-commerce over the web solves the problem of reaching the largest possible market; but, this centralized model is not appropriate for all kinds of items and services. The centralized model may also have trust and safety problems; because, buyers and sellers are connected based purely on the basis of price and features of the item being sold. Reviews, feedback ratings and other mechanisms attempt to solve this problem; but do not provide a traceable path of referrals between two parties who wish to trade.
The architecture of web based e-commerce is based on a web browser that has very little ability to store state locally and a centralized web site that holds all the information. This limits the user experience to the confines of a web page, and results in latency when viewing information that has to be downloaded from the web on each click. The web site itself has scalability issues and may slow down at times of high traffic. The web site may also have availability issues; because the web site must be running at all times to provide the service.
The prevailing model for e-commerce is that the seller is offering items for sale to anyone with a verifiable ability to pay. However, there are classes of items, such as family heirlooms, where the seller would like to constrain the scope of the sale to family members (or other defined group), and select the most deserving recipient rather than the highest offer for an item. Another example is a charity auction inside a company, where individuals offer items such as lunch with top executives, a ride in the CEO's aircraft, etc. and want to have each individual manage bidding on their items while constraining the entire auction to be only visible to co-workers.
It would be advantageous to support e-commerce on conventional peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, conventional P2P networks do not currently adequately support e-commerce models. For example, there are currently no P2P message exchange protocols that are efficient, secure, reliable for C2C/C2B (consumer-to-consumer/consumer-to-business) and designed for multi-channel communication networks that exploit both TCP/IP internet and VOIP-like networks. Historically, development of B2B (business-to-business) messaging protocols have taken place with different problems drivers and user community requirements.